‘Twins,’ I said before I turned away from her. ‘She thought it might be twins.’
I went to see Claire directly from the museum. She wasn’t home and I waited for several hours in her enormous house, listening to clocks chime and dogs bark and servants hustle about as if the world were on fire. When she did arrive and saw my face she dropped her parcels and called out for whiskey. I’d held out a faint hope that Isabel Swale, with her poor aptitude, had gotten it all wrong, but Claire doused it within seconds. They couldn’t stop the bleeding.’ She paused, guessing how much more I could handle. I held her gaze and took in a steady breath. ‘The ghastly thing is, Fen insisted on a sea burial. Her parents are apoplectic. Think he’s hiding something. They’ve started proceedings against him and the ship’s captain. It’s all been such a drama.’ She sounded quite bored by Nell’s death.
She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women. Her husband, she told me quite pointedly, was away for several days.
All I wanted was to call a cab and be delivered to my room. But I could not seem to ask for that, and sat in silence, willing my glass to stop shaking as I lifted it to my lips. I couldn’t seem to pull air into my lungs. I thought of Fen and Nell meeting on the boat: I’m having trouble breathing, she’d said. And then I broke down. No Southerner, Claire did her best to comfort me with palaver and awkward pats on the arm, but as soon as I could stand, she put me in a car that took me back down to the city.
30
On my ship, the SS Vedic, I walked the decks, stood at the rails, spoke to no one except the sea. There were times when I thought I saw her out there on the water, sitting cross-legged, surprised and grinning as if I’d just walked into the room. There were other times when the water was black as space, sinister in its enormity. She was out there. I did not know where. Fen had dumped her in the sea. She couldn’t even swim. Facts I still only half believed. I leaned over the rail and hollered out at the emptiness. I didn’t mind who heard. I’d hoped John and Martin, whose voices had always come to me when I was cracking up, would chime in but they were silent, too sorry for me, or too appalled, to make their usual fun.
We crossed into the Java Sea. The moon swelled to full.
Once, Nell had told me, there was a Mumbanyo man who wanted to kill the moon. He had discovered his wife bled each month and accused her of having another husband. She laughed and told him all women were married to the moon. I will kill this moon, the man said, and he got in his canoe and after many days he came to the tree from which the moon, tied to the highest branch by raffia string, jumped into the sky. Come down here so I can kill you, the man said to the moon, for you have stolen my wife. The moon laughed. Every woman is my wife first, he said. So in fact you stole this wife from me. This only made the man angrier and he climbed the tree to the highest branch and pulled at the raffia string. It would not move so he began to climb the string toward the moon. Soon his arms grew heavy and though he had climbed far from the tree he still was no closer to the moon. Let go now, the moon said. And the man, who had no more strength left, let go and fell directly into his canoe and paddled home to share his wife, as all men did, with the moon.
A tall brooding slightly unhinged Englishman is bound to capture the romantic imagination of some girl, and there was one from Shropshire who followed me around for a week or so, but she came to understand that my dark silences were never going to bloom into confessions of love, and took up with an Irish soldier.